Scaling social media intelligence part 3: Global organization design

This final article in the three-part series on scaling social media intelligence will cover the organization design challenges of a global social media intelligence capability. This topic builds on the part 1 article where I talked about extending the impact of social media intelligence to different functions like market research, analytics, media, R&D, PR and other teams and my part 2 article where I talked about extending the impact to global markets.

When I talked about global markets, I mentioned that even if, from a global perspective, you execute perfect and valid work for a local market, the output may not actually be relevant to their local needs if you did not involve the local teams in the execution or most importantly in the scoping. You may be asking the right questions for your need from a global perspective but do these match the needs in the target market?

A similar gap can be seen if you are doing work for different organization functions. For example, if you are doing work around social media measures of brand equity, and you don’t involve the research team to properly define terms and metrics could lead to significant disconnects.

Such potential gaps suggest the need to consider different options to organize social media intelligence teams. Fortunately, tech strategist Jeremiah Owyang has written about social business organization design and his framework, though developed over 10 years ago, is something I continue to reference when working with clients on issues related scaling social media related work, including social media intelligence.

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Taken from "Social Strategy, Getting Your Company Ready" by Jeremiah Owyang  

The four types of organizations

As Jeremiah suggests, when considering these different types, keep in mind that they represent organization culture more than an organization chart.

Organic

For an organic organization, different functions and/or different regions execute social media intelligence work without any real coordination, communication or standards and may very well use different social listening platforms or partners. Not surprisingly, this often happens at beginning stages of social media intelligence capability development in organizations where it is often the insights team or the PR/communications team taking lead in each charting their own path.

Centralized

For the centralized organization, one group does all the social media intelligence work for all functions and geographies. It is not unusual to see this in companies that are growing in terms of size and/or geographies. This organization works best when the social media intelligence group has analysts who are sufficiently knowledgeable about the function and the region they are supporting. For example, if the social media intelligence group is doing crisis monitoring in China, it is best that the person or persons leading the work know understand Chinese language/culture and the Chinese social media landscape. While this sounds obvious, I have seen plenty of organizations NOT do this which led to disastrous outcomes.

Coordinated

A coordinated organization acts more as a Center of Excellence for social across functions and/or geographies. They may not actually be as hands-on with the execution but can provide guidance and training to ensure consistency across stakeholders. They also will establish standards and take lead on selecting social listening platforms. As Jeremiah suggests, the coordinated organization should look to offer enablement, not policing. With this in mind, perhaps the biggest challenge in this organization type is finding a balance between the need for autonomy to address specific needs or nuances of functions or geographies and the need for consistency of approach and output from a global perspective.

It’s important to note that more and more, we see this Center of Excellence being the one which looks to find ways to integrate and find synergy for social media intelligence with other types of data, intelligence or insights. For example, they may lead the charge to find connections between social data and say sales data, or search data. Social media data cannot and should not sit in a silo, and it is the coordinated organization where we see much of the innovation with other data happening.

Hub and Spoke

The hub and spoke organization is most often seen in the large multinational companies, especially ‘group companies,’ that have multiple brand organizations across the world. There will be attempts to have single social listening platforms and standards, but this can be difficult as often the different brand organizations could be appealing to very different audiences or different products leading to very different ways of doing business.

How to apply the framework

As Jeremiah suggests, a good first step at applying this framework is first trying to understand which organization type best represents your company. Keep in mind, there is rarely an obvious answer since real, live organizations do not always fit neatly into clean cut frameworks. But there can be learning in the discussion about this and about alignment on what could be optimized in the current state and what could be gained by considering alternative organization types.

Change, and ultimately the change management that should come with it, are not easy and require buy-in from senior stakeholders across multiple functions, but with the ultimate goal of increasing the influence and impact of social media intelligence on the performance of the company, such efforts can be well worth it.

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